


Jigsaw

by SleepsWithCoyotes



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Body Horror, Gore, Horror, Loss of Limbs, M/M, Non-Consensual Medical Prodedures, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Traumatic Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 03:26:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6178396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SleepsWithCoyotes/pseuds/SleepsWithCoyotes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They take him apart and piece him back together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jigsaw

**Author's Note:**

> Part of my 2015 Halloween theme - this one is for the Frankenstein square. I put this one up with a giant **"squick warning!"** on my DW and tumblr, so if you'd like to know what you're getting into before giving this one a try, there's **additional warnings at the end.**

Sometimes there are doctors. Sometimes there are scientists. It's difficult to tell one from the other when they often wear the same uniform: suits, white coats, thin plastic gloves. Some are adamant that their fields be recognized, defending ignorance in one subject with their expertise in another. Some are more proficient with scalpels, others with electronics. Each have a tendency to experiment.

"The scarring is substantial," one of the doctors says, examining the soldier's shoulder. He is new, younger than most, with thick, dark hair and a boyish face. He looks harmless, even when he's tugging shrapnel from the soldier's flesh. "I thought the serum was supposed to take care of that. The other one didn't look like this."

"The other one wasn't made by Zola," the other doctor huffs. He's an older man, iron-haired, with a permanently bitter twist to his mouth. He despises Zola and also the young man he's training. Also the soldier. Perhaps the entire world. "It's revolting, the methods Zola used to make this...." He trails off, lost for words, gesturing almost furiously at the soldier.

The younger doctor grows still, eyes uncertain as they cut toward his superior. "Well, it's...it's not as if it really _feels_ any of this...."

Grey eyes narrow above a sneer. "Spare me your sentimental drivel. Do you remember nothing of the scientific method?" The younger doctor flushes but holds his tongue. "Have you never wondered why we haven't recreated this creature? Zola himself wasn't able to duplicate his own results after all the damn _tinkering_ he did. This project's 'great success' is nothing but a happy mistake."

The soldier would not call himself happy. The soldier would not call himself anything. The soldier sits patiently as the younger doctor finishes stitching him up with rough tugs of the thread.

The older doctor sniffs, bored again when his protégé doesn't argue the point. "At least its healing talents have improved over the years. That should barely leave a mark."

He wishes sometimes that it would. He doesn't remember years. He remembers days, weeks. He remembers there used to be months, before he became too erratic. Before the language changed again. Scars would be easier to keep track of than memories.

***

For nearly six minutes, the soldier is half-deafened. The shrill whine of artillery fire in flight sounds like the buzz of mosquitoes through the underwater hush that fills his ears, the dull thump of mortar rounds curiously distant even as concrete and sand geyser into the air around him. His escort is scattered, yelling to one another in frantic tones, forgetting their cover and jabbering in English. Only his handler sticks close, tugging at his left arm and yelling at him to leave them, get back to the transport, return to base.

His handler goes down with a bullet to the thigh: barely a crease, but it's distracting. Between the ringing in his ears and the confusing mess of orders he's been given--obey, protect, abandon, return--he doesn't notice the incoming shell. He doesn't feel it when it hits, tearing into his right arm and spinning him around. It plows into the house at his back in the next instant, blowing out the wall, and that knocks him down. He doesn't feel the pain, just a dropping-elevator lightness that washes through him from his head to his toes.

"Mother _fuck_!" his handler yelps, disbelief turning to sick terror as the soldier lists drunkenly to his feet. He's strangely off-balance. His right arm is cold. For the first time he can remember, he feels weak. "Jesus. Oh, Jesus, they're gonna fucking kill me."

He has orders. He should. He's supposed to be. He.

He goes to one knee when his handler tries to drag him to cover. That's unusual. Alarming. His right side feels cold now, from his hip to the top of his boot. His tactical suit sticks to his skin as he moves.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," his handler chants as he shoves up the soldier's sleeve, loose and flapping and wet. He ties a cord tightly around the soldier's upper arm, tightly enough his entire arm throbs. It feels like the pressure cuff the doctors use during maintenance, but this is a strange time for an exam.

The sunbaked, sunbleached walls of the alley slide and sway when he looks down at his arm, his arm that's...his....

 _Oh_ , he thinks as the world goes still. _I remember this_. Only there's sand instead of snow, desert heat instead of ice, right instead of left. It's close enough.

He doesn't remember what's left of the team forming up around him, the scramble back to their waiting transport or the trip back to base. He goes where they tell him, sits where they tell him, waits. He opens and closes the fingers of a right hand that isn't there. It distracts him.

"What the hell happened?" the controller shouts, face red with fury. The soldier sits very still in the chair, the doctors swarming over him already, but the controller isn't yelling at him. "What the fuck did you do?"

"Sir," the handler says smartly, standing at attention but favoring his right leg, drawing attention to the red stain slowly spreading across his thigh each time he shifts. "We had the target in our sights, but the insurgents had moved in closer than we thought. When the asset took the shot, they must have thought it was an attack."

"And you didn't notice a pack of guerrillas moving up on your position?"

The soldier had, but no one had asked him.

"I--the asset was restless, and--"

"Of course he was fucking restless--you were being overrun! And now look at the damage you've caused! The most expensive piece of equipment you'll ever even see, and you bring him back in pieces! What were you thinking?"

The handler is trembling. "Sir, I apologize for the waste, but--with two mechanical arms, the asset should be even more precise--"

"The arm is one of a kind," the controller spits. "Irreplaceable. With only one, the asset's useless."

The doctors falter at that, drawing a little away as the room goes quiet. The soldier understands. There's no point in continuing their work if he's to be decommissioned. A cold, aching knot in the center of his chest cautiously relaxes.

"I--"

The controller's eyes snap over the handler's shoulder. His nod is tiny; before his chin returns to its original position, the front of the handler's skull explodes in a spray of fine droplets and thick clots. His body drops gracelessly to the floor.

Dragging in a deep breath through his nose, the controller wipes a few red spatters from his cheek and glances down in disgust at his suit. He ignores the mess, cold blue eyes fixing on the soldier instead.

"Prep him," he says.

"For...cryo, sir?" asks the head doctor.

"Surgery. You're going to do a limb replacement."

The doctor swallows hard. Rubber squeaks as his gloved hands clench nervously. "But--we'd need a donor--"

"There's one right here," the controller says, glancing down at the handler and up again.

"Sir, the odds of rejection are astronomical. The asset would need to be on immunosuppressants before we even started--"

"The upper limits of his healing factor have yet to be determined," the controller says shortly. "Now's as good a time as any to test it."

"Y-yes, sir."

He doesn't...understand. He knows the usual drugs don't work on him, so he isn't expecting a shot. It makes sense that his flesh must be neatened up, the bone smoothed before it can heal. But the handler doesn't have an arm to spare, only the two he was born with. It doesn't make sense.

They give him the bite guard while they're working. It doesn't keep him quiet, but it helps. He grips hard, grinding his teeth into the rubber as he turns his face to the left, mashing his cheek against the padded back of the chair. It gives him an unobstructed view of the door as they wheel in two tables covered with plastic sheeting. A second surgical team lifts his former handler onto one of the tables, swiftly cutting away the sleeve of his uniform. The other table must be meant for the soldier.

"Shitty angle for this," one of the doctors mutters under his breath.

"At least he's not moving around." The scrape of a file proves him wrong. "Much."

"Enough chatter," the head doctor snaps. His balding head gleams with sweat. "Is that ready? Then get this thing on the table; it's lost too much blood already. Have we got enough in storage for a transfusion?"

They take him out of the chair and put him on the table. He wants the chair back. The cuffs are stronger; he doesn't have to work so hard at holding himself still, and the electricity often puts him straight to sleep.

He keeps his head turned to the left. They're cutting into the handler as well, peeling back skin and meat and turning on the saw. They're making him match the soldier. It's a stupid punishment. The handler can't feel a thing.

They bring the arm over and lay it down next to him. He doesn't like it there. It doesn't touch him, but he imagines he can feel its presence weighing down the table at his hip as they clamp down on muscles, tendons, veins, and begin to tug. As they begin to stitch.

The stump of his arm feels cold. Clammy. Lukewarm. Mashed into something too giving, that won't heat up. Something weak.

"Where's that blood?" the head doctor demands. "If the serum in his cells doesn't kick in--"

He's still trying to flex the fingers of his right hand. He's still trying. He's.

His index finger twitches.

***

There's a scar on his right arm the next time he wakes, and he looks at it for a long while. The entire time they're defrosting him, he stares at the thin ring bordered by tiny, neat dots, on the lower side but not the upper. The scarring isn't bad, except that he doesn't really scar anymore. He stares until they make him suit up, and then he flexes his hand. Open, close. His hand feels normal. They test his strength in that arm, as if they're curious too. There's no change in his capabilities; the arm is as steady and strong as ever. Only the skin seems a little darker, as if it's gotten more sun.

He goes out and does the mission. They put in him the chair again, then the chamber. They thaw him out, test the arm, give him a mission. He comes back, freezes, wakes.

He goes out--

***

Chaos again. It was a mine, they tell the controller, and it's ridiculous--it's been so long since the war, and who just leaves a mine in a random field, and how does something like that go undiscovered? How could they possibly have prepared against that? It's bad luck, no one's fault, just really bad luck.

The controller shoots the handler himself this time.

"Prep him," he says.

The soldier is already on the table. He feels curiously light without the leg, even though his left arm is the heaviest part of him.

***

Another mission. Another. A building falls. He lies very quietly with a piece of rebar sticking through him. A tiny part of him hopes that if he's very still, this time they won't find him.

They do.

"Does he _need_ two kidneys?" one of the doctors asks doubtfully as they're repairing him.

Another shrugs. "Madison's not going to be needing his anymore. Why not test it out?"

That one doesn’t scar, not like his arm, his leg. He feels sick for a few hours, but then they put him in the chamber. When he wakes, he feels fine.

 _Madison_ , he thinks as he sheathes a knife at the small of his back.

There's no mark, but he remembers the name.

***

He stops looking at himself. He's rarely out of the suit, never while he's out under the sunlight, but his left leg remains too pale, his right arm too tanned. He slips, starts to forget--thinks his holdout knife is _named_ Madison--until something makes him remember. The loss of his right leg at the ankle, then the knee. A perforated liver. His minders.

"Better be careful, Rumlow," one of them jokes. "If he gets his balls shot off, Pierce is liable to give him yours."

"Not if I shoot you first, asshole," Rumlow growls. His face has turned a sickly hue. "You know how he feels about waste."

The soldier's stomach rolls unpleasantly, but they haven't replaced that, so he doesn't know why it does so. It's best if he doesn't question his body too closely.

Later there's a man whose face he knows, and who knows where the man got it from? But he speaks in a voice the soldier knows, in a _way_ the soldier knows, and that seems harder to steal. The man calls him Bucky, and he wonders which piece of him the man recognizes. He only knows Madison by name. Rumlow still has all his parts.

On the helicarrier, angry as he is, he uses his left hand as he hits and hits and hits, because it's the only one he thinks of as his. It wouldn't be fair to use the man's friend against him. But then the man says, "Finish it," and he thinks of Rumlow's words, how Pierce hates waste, and wonders which part of this man they'll end up grafting onto him. The lungs that gasped for every breath? The heart that shuffled rather than thumped beneath his ear? The bones that never grew?

_The heart._

He stares, frozen in horror. He. There is. There is one part. Only ever one part. There is only ever one thing he has ever wanted.

_Steve's. His._

He dives because he can't let himself fall, doesn't dare to be broken at the end.

He leaves the man on the bank because he must have his own masters, and they might not realize the soldier is no good, mostly secondhand already.

***

Steve likes to hug him, and he hugs like they're handing out trophies. First he plasters himself across Bucky's back or tries to merge with him chest-to-chest, a warm, solid weight that smells of hot summers and dry paper and a little of gun oil, if he's been making himself useful. His arms wrap under Bucky's, hands splaying out wide to cover every inch of him they can, sliding under the hem of his T-shirt if they're alone, hungry for skin. He hooks his chin over Bucky's shoulder--right or left, no difference--and leans his head into Bucky's neck, and breathes. If his hips mold themselves to Bucky's ass or if he strokes down the plates of Bucky's left arm to play with his fingers, that's fine. Bucky likes all of these things. Bucky loves it when Steve touches _him_.

The rest is...more complicated.

The first time Steve asks, they're curled together in sticky sheets, slick with sweat and languorous. Bucky doesn't tense too much when Steve traces the scar on his right bicep with the pad of his thumb, but Steve notices. He stills his touch, hesitates, but doesn't pull away.

"What's this from?" Steve asks quietly, eyes warm and supportive.

 _A dead man_.

He doesn't say it. He shrugs.

"Nothing much," he says instead, catching that hand in his left and twining their fingers together, metal to flesh. "Just some scars."

Steve holds tight, determined to love all of Bucky, even the cold, silver arm he thinks is a stranger's.

**Author's Note:**

> After losing the left arm, over the course of the next seventy years, he loses the others in several unrelated missions. Hydra experiments with limb (and organ) transplantation using the handlers unlucky enough to let such a valuable asset be damaged in the first place.


End file.
